“Green” building for meeting needs of customers and employees 

Endress+Hauser Cana­da has built one of the “green­est” com­pa­ny build­ings in the coun­try for 20 mil­lion euros. The new­ly opened cus­tomer and train­ing cen­ter in Burlington/Ontario, locat­ed around 50 kilo­me­ters south­west of Toron­to, is ener­gy self-suf­fi­cient and CO2-neu­tral. A process engi­neer­ing train­ing facil­i­ty, a large cal­i­bra­tion lab­o­ra­to­ry, a work­shop, a train­ing cen­ter and around 120 mod­ern work­sta­tions have been accom­mo­dat­ed on 4,400 square meters of floor space — dou­ble the pre­vi­ous location. 

The com­pa­ny has had its own sales com­pa­ny in Cana­da since 1990, serv­ing cus­tomers from Man­i­to­ba to the Atlantic provinces. The employ­ees at the head­quar­ters in Burling­ton and in branch­es in Mon­tre­al, Cal­gary and Edmon­ton are sup­port­ed by var­i­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Whether basic mate­ri­als, met­als & min­ing, oil & gas, food, chem­i­cals, life sci­ences, water & waste­water, ener­gy & pow­er plants — vir­tu­al­ly all indus­tries are at home in this resource-rich country. 

New building stands for brand values 

“The cus­tomer and train­ing cen­ter is an impres­sive exam­ple of Endress+Hauser’s glob­al strat­e­gy of build­ing and main­tain­ing cus­tomer part­ner­ships. This is how we grow, in Cana­da and around the world. It shows our com­mit­ment to cus­tomers and our ded­i­ca­tion to sustainability.” 

- Matthias Altendorf, CEO

Statement to the public 

“The new build­ing should express our aspi­ra­tions as a com­pa­ny — to our cus­tomers, but also to the pub­lic as a whole,” empha­sizes CEO Antho­ny Var­ga. Dur­ing the plan­ning process, the focus was on the needs of the cus­tomers. “We can sup­port cus­tomers here in the best pos­si­ble way through­out the entire life cycle of their facil­i­ties. We offer a wel­com­ing envi­ron­ment and set stan­dards with the eco­log­i­cal build­ing design.” 

Practical training 

At the heart of the new build­ing is a process train­ing unit; the sec­ond facil­i­ty of its kind in Cana­da. Such Process Train­ing Units (PTU) exist at Endress+Hauser sites around the world. At these pilot plants, cus­tomers can prac­tice using a wide range of mea­sur­ing instru­ments. They ben­e­fit from the long-stand­ing part­ner­ship with Rock­well Automa­tion and oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers. Cus­tomers can thus sim­u­late con­di­tions on the plant that are sim­i­lar to their own operations. 

Renewable energy 

The Group places great empha­sis on sus­tain­abil­i­ty and ener­gy effi­cien­cy in con­struc­tion projects all over the world. The new build­ing in Cana­da cov­ers its elec­tric­i­ty needs via 800 solar mod­ules on the roof. These can gen­er­ate around 408,000 kilo­watt hours of elec­tri­cal ener­gy per year. This exceeds the build­ing’s needs, so elec­tric­i­ty can be fed into the grid. A geot­her­mal sys­tem extracts heat via 50 wells from a depth of 180 meters and dis­trib­utes it through­out the build­ing via 63 heat pumps. 

Sophisticated architecture 

South-fac­ing win­dows on the upper floor cap­ture sun­light, and the triple-glazed facade pre­vents heat loss. A four-meter-high ficus tree in the atri­um improves air qual­i­ty and sym­bol­izes the “green” idea. Thanks to all these mea­sures, the build­ing is one of the green­est struc­tures in the coun­try. It is the first pri­vate com­pa­ny to seek all three cer­ti­fi­ca­tions from the Cana­da Green Build­ing Coun­cil: the Net Zero Ener­gy and Zero Car­bon Build­ing Stan­dards, and Lead­er­ship in Ener­gy and Envi­ron­men­tal Design (LEED) Gold.